Gerald Hannon complained thus on the TFEW mailing list, under the subject heading “The importance of punctuation”:
From the contents page of the online Toronto Life (April issue)[:]
*One Hundred and Eighteen Days * Of the many humiliations James Loney suffered during his terrifying captivity in Baghdad, the worst was his kidnappers’ promise---delivered and broken, over and over---that he was about to be set free By Gerald Hannon
This isn’t a question of punctuation but of markup. The original is marked up thus:
<p><strong>One Hundred and Eighteen Days</strong><br />
Of the many humiliations James Loney suffered during his terrifying captivity in Baghdad, the worst was his kidnappers’ promise—delivered and broken, over and over—that he was about to be set free By Gerald Hannon</p>
It’s supposed to look like this:
<h2>One Hundred and Eighteen Days</h2>
<p>Of the many humiliations James Loney suffered during his terrifying captivity in Baghdad, the worst was his kidnappers’ promise – delivered and broken, over and over – that he was about to be set free</p>
<p class="byline">By Gerald Hannon</p>
These are the incompetent fucks who just bought Torontoist. (Then again, everyone who responded to Hannon’s message top-posted, sometimes several plies deep. These are the people creating your content.)
As ever with Toronto Life, reality never intrudes on the magazine’s coverage, aimed as it is at the dumb rich. That pattern extends even to the technical sphere: A magazine that can’t even mark up a table-of contents page (and whose very slugs are half-assed) claims Toronto is ruled by “app kings.”